Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

The EPA Thinks You're Stupid

By Alan
Caruba

The folks
at the Environmental Protection Agency, starting with a long line of its
administrators that now includes Gina McCarthy, think you and the Congress of
the United States are stupid. They have been telling lies for so long they
can’t imagine that their chokehold on the American economy will ever end.

It is,
however, coming to an end and the reason is a Republican-controlled Congress
responding to the countless businesses and individuals
being ravaged by a ruthless bureaucracy driven by an environmental agenda
determined to deprive America of the energy sources vital to our lives and the
nation’s existence.

EPA's Gina McCarthy

This was
on display in early March when Gina McCarthy testified to the Senate
Environmental and Public Works Committee, asking for a nearly $500 million
increase in its 2016 budget. The total discretionary budget request would have
topped out at $8.6 billion and would reward states nearly $4 billion to go
along with the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

The
problem is that the Clean Power Plan is really about no power or far more
costly power in those states where the EPA has been shutting down coal-fired
plants that not long ago provided fifty percent of all the electricity in the
nation.

“More than
72 gigawatts (GW) of electrical generating capacity have already, or are now
set to retire because of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA)
regulations. The regulations causing these closures include the Mercury and Air
Toxics Standards (colloquially called MATS, or Utility MACT), proposed Cross
State Air Pollution Rule (CSAPR), and the proposed regulation of carbon dioxide
emissions from existing power plants.

To put 72 GW in perspective, that is
enough electrical generation capacity to reliably power 44.7 million homes—or
every home in every state west of the Mississippi River, excluding Texas. In
other words, EPA is shutting down enough generating capacity to power every
home in Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Montana,
Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas,
Oklahoma, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana.

Plants closed or soon to be

Over 94
percent these retirements will come from generating units at coal-fired power
plants, shuttering over one-fifth of the U.S.’s coal-fired generating capacity.
While some of the effected units will be converted to use new fuels, American
families and businesses will pay the price with higher utility bills and less
reliability for their electricity.”

What
nation would knowingly reduce its capacity to produce the electricity that
everyone depends upon?

Answer: The United States of America.

Why? Because the
EPA has been telling us that coal-fired plants produce carbon dioxide (CO2) and
it is causing ours and the world’s temperature to increase to a point that
threatens our lives. They have
been claiming that everything from blizzards to droughts, hurricanes to forest
fires, are the result of the CO2 that coal-fired plants produce.

That is a
huge, stupendous lie.

In the
Senate Committee meeting, McCarthy said, “Climate change is real. It is
happening. It is a threat. Humans are causing the majority of that threat...the
impacts are being felt. Climate change is not a religion. It is not a belief
system. It’s a scientific fact. And our challenge is to move forward with the
actions we need to protect future generations.”

Climate
change is real. It’s been real for 4.5 billion years and it has absolutely nothing
to do with anything that humans do, least of all heating, cooling and lighting
their homes, running their businesses, and everything else that requires
electricity.

McCarthy said that the EPA’s overall goal was to save the planet from rising
sea levels, massive storms, and other climate events that impact our lives. No,
that’s not why the EPA was created in 1970. Its job was to clean the water and
the air. It has done a relatively good job, but its mandate had nothing to do with
the climate, nor does the provision of energy have any impact on the climate.
The reverse is true. The climate has a lot of impact on us.

Regarding
the “science” McCarthy referred to, according to a 2013 report by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there were record low tornadoes,
record low hurricanes, record gain in Arctic and Antarctic ice, no change in
the rate of sea levels, and there had been NO WARMING at that point for 17—now
19—years.

When Sen.
Jeff Sessions asked McCarthy a number of questions about droughts and
hurricanes, she either dodged providing a specific answer or claimed, as with
hurricanes, that “I cannot answer that question. It’s a very complicated
issue.”

Asked
about the computer models on which the EPA makes its regulatory decisions, McCarthy replied, “I do not know what the models actually are predicting that
you are referring to.” Sen. Sessions said that it was incredible that the
Administrator of the EPA “doesn’t know whether their predictions have been
right or wrong.”

As for any
“science” the EPA may be using, much of it is SECRET.

H.
Sterling Burnett, the managing editor of the Heartland Institute’s Environment & Climate News, reported
on The Secret Science Reform Act (HR 4012) introduced by the House Science
Committee late last year. The bill would “prohibit the Environmental Protection
Agency from proposing, finalizing, or disseminating regulations or assessments
based on science that is not transparent or reproducible.”

The House
passed the Act on November 20, 2014 and it has been received in the Senate,
read twice, and referred to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. If
it passes the Senate, that will be a giant leap forward in gaining oversight
and control of the EPA.

Until
then, the EPA’s administrator and staff will continue to work their mischief in
the belief that both Congress and the rest of us are stupid. We’re not.

3 comments:

Dr. Jay Lehr is the science director of the Heartland Institute. He's also one of the founders of the EPA. He's convinced the EPA is out of control and hasn't done anything worthwhile since 1980, so he's outlined a plan to replace them in five years. Please view that plan here.

I wonder if the eclipse or abolition of large institutions is a bad thing in most cases. Whether the EPA or Australia's CSIRO are in question, it's worth asking if the advantages of continuity, understandably substantial, aren't outweighed by what we might call Byzantium syndrome.

Things get old and are meant to crumble before they take the light and nutrient from new life. Bureaucracies - and "iconic" industries and banks "too large to fail" - are exempted for some reason from these natural processes which apply to old trees, old sandwich shops or old footy clubs.

Did planes stop flying when Pan-Am stopped flying? Do I need Polaroid to point a small Sony phone at a photographic subject?

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.